Trai firm on its date with revised IUC

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) is firm on implementing the revised interconnect usage charges (IUC) regime from February 1. “There are no moves at all in the Trai to delay the IUC implementation. It will be implemented on February 1, as decided earlier,” said Trai chairman Pradip Baijal.

This assumes importance since most of the operators have been indicating that IUC implementation may be delayed since other operators are not ready.

On Wednesday, Tata Teleservices and Reliance Infocomm said that they were ready at their end to implement the revised IUC, but Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) was not yet prepared. TTSL managing director S Ramakrishnan and Reliance Infocomm president Prakash Bajpai maintained that IUC implementation from February 1 would be possible only if both the cellular operators and BSNL were prepared for the same.

They also said that they were ready to implement the new number scheme for their subscribers from February 1, but when it gets implemented is a function of how and when other telecom operators are ready to change their switches technically in order to accept the new numbers.

BSNL CMD VP Sinha, meanwhile, on Thursday, maintained, “From our side, we are ready for the implementation of revised IUC.”

Bharti Tele-Ventures’ president mobility Manoj Kohli also said that Bharti is ready for IUC implementation.

It may be recalled that with the implementation of revised IUC, fixed line STD rates will go down.

Both BSNL and Touchtel had announced their relatively lower STD rates in December which were to come into effect, as and when the revised IUC is implemented.